Recent reviews by Mister Sko

To the point
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A phenomenal hidden gem of a third person shooter. Absolutely worth your time and money, wish I'd played it sooner.

+Cleared on Challenging+

Good Stuff
=================
- The Story is great, it's sad and introspective and even funny in parts. It does a wonderful job of tackling serious subject matter while revealing things at a brisk pace. Even during some of the duller moments in the game I found myself pressing onward to get to the end.

- Our MC, James Savage, is voice acting wonderfully, with the actor capturing all the best things about Max Payne while putting his own spin on it

-The guns are all fun to use and, most importantly, never feel useless. I got as much mileage from the pistols as I did from the end game weapons. Maybe my one complaint was that it would be nice to see some occult style weapons considering the setting

- The soundtrack will surprise you, there are the usual atmospheric tracks you'd expect in this kind of game along with some truly interesting and bizarre vocal/ techno tracks. I always enjoyed hearing more of the fringe sounding tracks seemingly pop up out of nowhere

- The minute to minute gameplay is a lot of fun and you'll feel like a bad ass mowing down tons of enemies. It can get a bit more tedious in the later levels with copious enemies spawning behind you or directly around corners but it's still a fun challenge and there's a million ways to tackle it.

Bad Stuff
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- The game overstays its welcome just a touch at a dense 50 levels. It feels like big plot things happen only to go through 10+ levels of meandering before the follow through.

- The boss fights, especially on Challenging, are pretty bad. There are only 2 but it's all: Boss attacks you, Dodge them, attack, rinse and repeat and there's basically no breathing room to do anything else. Just fairly boring considering how fun the rest of the game is.

- There are a ton of weird bugs, some that I've found:

- If you engage a horde of enemies, then die and go back to a checkpoint, those enemies are still aggro'd, coming right at you, once get back to them. Hell, sometimes they'll beeline right at you from several room away
- If you pick up an item, for instance a weapon, and die immediately afterwards, the weapon will be gone on reload but it may not be in your inventory. Thanks to this I played a good portion of the game without a grenade launcher.

- We could definitely use a counter for the number of civilians on a map as I'd like to know if any died before I rescued them so I could restart.

To the point
====================
An attempt to ape Silent Hill produces a janky, dark and ugly mess

+Played on Normal Difficulty+

Good Stuff
====================
- I really enjoyed the blend of high-tech cyberpunk stuff with the archaic design of the games main setting. Too bad this is instantly dropped after the intro and never really mentioned or used again, but there's potential there for someone to do it right

Bad Stuff
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- This game is dark, like subject matter too but it's just incredibly dark. Even cranking up the brightness all the way doesn't do much to save the game from being an indecipherable mess during any moments that require quick thinking and reflex.

- The menu doesn't save any changes made, so remember how I said you have to turn up the brightness? Well that's an "every time you open the game' kind of thing here.

- There is just a ton of jankiness in this game, especially when it comes to activating things (like a door) then saving and quitting, only for the door to be back in place afterwards. Now for the record, you still interact with the door like it's unlocked but it will 100% look locked or you knock down a wall with a consumable item only for it to be back in place after saving and loading. Just bizarre

- There are generously 4 enemies in this game. Zombie, Spikey Zombie, Gas Zombie, Zombie dog, and frankly you can simply beat them all to death with the first weapon if you fight smartly. Aside from their boring and generic designs, the end of the game presents a 'challenge' by throwing a mob of them at you wherever you go. It's not fun or scary it's just tedious

- The story is.....well ♥♥♥♥ I don't even really know. It hits all the predictable beats a Silent Hill rip-off should (omnious phone calls, weird noises when you turn your back, static. etc.) but I never gave a flying fig about the MC or her friend or whatever. Maybe I missed something in the story but who knows.

- There's no quick or auto-save, even before this games poor excuse for a boss, so if you die then be prepared to go waaaaay back to the save point and a ton of walking to get back to it.

To the point
==================
A great trip down memory lane with a mountain of variety. It's keeps all the bad stuff from the era too, which is why I'd recommend it on sale only.

Good Stuff
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- It's such an incredible value for your money, full-price or not. 50 games that would each stand on their own as steam releases if the publishers were so inclined, thankfully they were kind enough to bundle them all together.

- The designs are so incredibly faithful to the era, which was right when I was introduced to gaming, that I can't help but feel this overwhelming appreciation and nostalgia in equal measure

- The soundtrack is wonderful, combining the aesthetic of the music from yesteryear, with the knowledge we had for chiptune creation now-a-days. The end result is a joy to listen to.

Bad Stuff
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- There's no way around it, the games of the late 80's mostly controlled like garbage and that is present here. This was a limitation of the time that we surmounted and led to retro looking games with great controls like Shovel Knight.

I understand why this wasn't done here, you need to emulate EVERYTHING, including the bad stuff but man the bad stuff is BAD. Sluggish controls and draconian life systems make most of the games frustratingly hard, which is great for elitists but less so for people who play more casually.

If fighting the game itself is something you're looking for, this will absolutely scratch that itch, but for most it'll be incredibly frustrating.

To the point
===================
A fun and beautiful successor to Contra but man, it's just too short for the price tag. Very worth it on sale

<Cleared on Hard difficulty>

Good Stuff
===================
- The game is full of beautiful sprite work, everything is vibrant with a lot of great animations really showing off the interesting bio-mechanical designs of the game

- The difficulty, on both medium and hard, is not oppressive, which is important for a Contra-like game. You will feel like you are making progress even when you run out of lives and have to continue and there are no "traps" where enemies can cut down a chunk of your lives with no input from you.

- The weapons and power-ups are great fun and no gun felt useless. Special points for the temporary upgrades, the steroids, which improve the gun you're using, and the omni-directional bullet thing. I also LOVE that collecting multiples of the same power-up makes what you're carrying more powerful.

Bad Stuff
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- It's just short, like incredibly short. I beat hard mode clocking in at around 90 minutes, which included my replays etc. I know the price tag is 20 bucks but come on. At least I didn't feel as ripped off as when I bought Moonrider.

- There's really no replayability other then unlocking skins. I recall the old 3DS contra ( which is a game grandmas and grandpas like me played) had challenge maps that kept me playing well towards the 20ish hour mark. but once you're done here you get a mirror mode to play the levels in reverse and that's it.

- The unlocks are underwhelming as I didn't care about the minor cosmetic changes the skins provide. It's not a bad thing they included them but again just a poor motivation for replays.

To the point
=================
An amazingly atmospheric Boomer Shooter that brings enough to the table that it's practically a noir resurrection of Deus Ex. Definitely a great purchase for fans of either game.

+Cleared on Hard Difficulty+
Good Stuff
================
- The noir aesthetic is completely spot on from the design to the dialogue to the world itself. Umburgh or 'Switchbalde City' really feels like a living breathing world and I can't wait to see more.

- The levels are sprawling and they really reward you for looking around and checking everything. I was shocked when, after fighting my way out of the opening hotel, that I could have opted to sneak out through the skylight, kick open an apartment window and take a leap of faith, climb up across some billboards or even get out through the sewers. This isn't a one-off and objectives/areas are rich with alternative ways to get access or attack the enemy.

- The melee combat, while not too deep, is very fun and rewarding. Provided you are careful you can dodge and weave around large groups of enemies, picking them off one-by-one using your fists, the environment, and literally anything you can get your hands on.

- The stealth mechanics are solid and it adds yet another approach with how you would like to tackle this sandbox world and the missions given to you.

- The story, which is a personal taste of mine, is really cool. It has all the trappings of a standard noir story, but added ♥♥♥♥ Tracy style elements with over the top and visually interesting characters. I really love the contrast between the gritty hardcore style gangster movies with the over the top, superhero-ish aesthetic.

- You can interact with nearly every and anything in the world. While this doesn't mean everything is useful, I was pleasently surprised to see I could pick up an expresso machine during a fist fight and throw it to trigger a trap some goons were standing by. It helps to add a whole new level to combat.

- A lot of wonderful voice acting and incidental lines that you'll here when skulking around. From 2 goons complaining about their girlfriends to another one that is lamenting over teh nature of a sandwich. These additions made the world seem more alive and were both surprising and funny additions.

Bad Stuff
==============
- This game is dark...well in tone also but I mean just poorly lit in general. You get a lighter but it hardly works at all. For the record, I did turn the brightness up just about all the way and it barely made a difference.

- The goons are very psychic and if you knock out one you'll have guys that should have had no business hearing it sprint over from half-way across the map. Maybe this was due to the hard difficulty setting but it's annoying to have to shoot one guy and then having an army coming at you ready to go.

- The inventory system stinks. You can hold 3 items and bullets count as different items then the guns they go in. I think this is to make melee the focus but it's frustrating that I can't carry like 15-20 bullets in my pockets or something.

To the point
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Actraiser in name only, this is more of an exercise in how long you can endure awful tower defense mechanics. If you're expecting a faithful recreation, skip this one for sure.

+Cleared on Hard mode+

Good Stuff
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- It sort of scratches that Actraiser itch since this isn't a very common genre of game with a bunch of random ideas thrown in. There are parts of each portion, like the side scrolling, town building and yes, even the awful tower defense, that I enjoy, it's just that the glaring flaws of each mode are a huge turn off.

Bad Stuff
==============================

- So in this version the gameplay was changed to have tower defense segments, where the enemies will spawn and try to attack certain objectives, which you use the heroes in the story to defend against.

It's hard to describe how annoying this system is, it's both incredibly slow and incredibly unbalanced. You'll have enemies that take all your forces working nonstop to injure that do 50% of a structures health in a single hit. In these kinds of fights you need to adopt a strategy of trying to dump all damage/spells/units possible while letting everything else burns, it makes the mode incredibly unenjoyable.

What's worse then that?

Oh you have to do it at the MINIMUM of 5 times per settlement? This is not including random horde encounters, which start appearing when you destroy all the monster spawners on a map.

The whole system is incredibly persistent, it almost makes me think Square thought this mode was fun or was trying to pad as much time as possible.

- The 2D sections have some of the jankiest hitboxes you're going to see in a modern game and it's inexcusable for a company as big as Square Enix even if this is so obviously a budget title. The funniest thing is it works to your advantage half the time, keeping you safe from enemy hits or making it easy to dodge harder attacks. Other time's you'll be getting hit by something that looks to be the size of a baseball with the hitbox of a hippo.

- You cannot control how fast buildings spawn things, this can lead to feeling like you are waiting forever for a resources or food spawn, especially on the smaller maps where you can only have 3 factories active at any given time.

- This title takes anime ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ to a whole new level. I like the characters even if they're pretty damn one dimensional but my GOD does this game interrupt you every 5 seconds to hear them talk, or for your patrons to come and request something from you. It drags teh pacing of the game into the mud.

- You can't control where your faithful build things, which is annoying for 2 reasons. One, if you happen to have a "protect all farms" siege mission, but your followers build them all in a cluster across the map away from your very limited towers, well you can move the towers and demolish the town in the process or you can play the map on hard mode and the aforementioned elite enemies ♥♥♥♥ on your farm one by one.

The second reason is that towns can only reach a max population if the buildings are laid out " correctly" meaning the AI will place them as optimally as possible but if it can't it won't tell you and you'll be stuck with a lower population. Only way around this? Nuke all buildings on the map and hope they do it right the next time.

- Even if you want to play smart in tower defense mode, you really cannot since the placement of towers/gatehouses etc ii seemingly, randomly constrained for no reason.

The towers you can place are limited by town size but say you want to move a tower right next to a farm that needs defending? Can't do that since the game has decided you can't use that square for some reason.

To note, this is a little different then trying to place these towers on a house since it will just demolish the house which is easy enough, but what I am saying is that there are major choke-points on a map that you can't use because the game decides you can't put a gatehouse there. Just an incredibly bizarre choice.

To the point
================
It's been a good long time since I've played a game with such a frustrating mechanic. If you like constantly fighting a grapple then this is the game for you, otherwise skip it.

+Edit: I opted to put another few hours in to this game to see if I could get the hang of it and it's still controls terribly. Officially threw in the towel on this one.+

Good stuff
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- I liked the small variety of weapons I had picked up. Their different utility and charge forms helped to keep me constantly switching weapons to find the best one for the situation.

Bad Stuff
=================
- I have played quite a number of Metroidvanias but I have yet to encounter something as poorly designed/infuriating as the grapple in Rusted Moss. The game has a good number of physics puzzles where you need to manipulate yourself and the grapple in order to make jumps, move with a strong breeze, etc. and frankly the precision being asked for here is beyond the games controls, especially on the recommended Keyboard+Mouse setup.

This means you will always be wrestling with the grappling mechanics and missing jumps/falling to your death. Thankfully the game has a very generous system for starting you back on the nearest ledge but it doesn't lessen the frustration of the mechanic as a whole.

- Some upgrades for the barely working grapple are completely incomprehensible.

Here's an example, you get an upgrade that says " You can shorten your bungee by pressing down"

So you bungee and press down and ... nothing happens.

Maybe you're doing it wrong, you try a few different ways of trying to wrangle this terrible mechanic and there's no noticable difference.

Turns out, for whatever reason, the upgrade is DISABLED by default, you need to go into the settings menu to turn it on.

I cannot being to fathom why they made this like they did.

- I'm not sure why they give you guns with ranges of like 4-5 feet. There are, of course, add-ons to increase the range but the distance is laughable. For the record, most enemies outside of the starting area will have no problem hitting you from double your guns distance while you are trying to manage the aforementioned grapple.

- This is one of those games where you have around 6 units of health but everything deals a minimum of 3 pips a shot. Especially for the early game, the damage just feels overtuned

-The story seems to pick up right after a very exciting part, where the main character, Fern, has just destroyed her home and betrayed all her friends. Sadly, we the player do not get to see this and it's all implied by the characters you meet. Imagine playing Super Metroid without the initial baby metroid escape, tremendous missed opportunity.

- Fern, the MC, is probably one of the most unlikeable edgelords I can remember in anything I've played recently. Minor thing as this may change throughout the story but I couldn't bother finishing this so I don't know.

To the point
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A silly, fast-paced, vibrant and extremely chaotic FPS. A great purchase for fans of BoomShoots, Speedrunning and Hotline Miami

Good Stuff
====================
- The game has some excellent controls. Whether it's the gunplay or the titular kicking, everything feels great and responsive. Foot-punching through hordes of gangbangers is a ton of fun.

- The designs of Sh*t city, its denizens and gangs, are all extremely unique. The game does a nice job of pacing out new visuals, even in the same hubs, to keep things visually interesting.

- Each zone and sometimes individual levels, helps to introduce new mechanics and you won't see them being grossly overused. This can lead to you running in to new and fun ways to interact with the world the further into your playtime.

- The soundtrack is incredibly fitting and matches the action perfectly. I personally do not like *WUB* WUB* style dance music but it works so well here I can't help but enjoy it.

- There's a nice variety to the weapons and the enemies that use them. I feel like I was being given new gear and facing new opponents right up until the final map. While some of these are just different ways of using the same enemies ( like standard enemies who hang from ceiling tiles) it really helps breaking up the monotony.

- There was another game recently, Mullet Mad Jack, that was a speed running game but I really disliked it since you can't stop and smell the roses in a level. This game promotes speed running ( and indeed it's when I had the most fun with Angerfoot) but it's not required so you can appreciate the whole world aesthetic.

- The challenges, 3 per level, really help to increase the run time. From simply speed running, to not using gun, the using a specific sneaker, promote a ton of replayability.

Bad Stuff
=================
- Boss 4. For the record, he's not difficult, but absolutely one of the least fun bosses with massive periods of immunity and, for some reason, random attack patterns where he can go for minutes without revealing a weak point.

- The shoes, while interesting, never really struck me as critical. Sure it's Angerfoot's reason for living, but I did the vast majority of the game barefoot and enjoyed the hell out of it. There are a lot of sneakers but none of them really changed the gameplay in such a way that I wanted to use them regularly.

- It would be nice if you could restart a map and equip a new shoe without having to exit a level and go back to the map. Small quality of life thing but it would be appreciated.

To the point
=========================
A fun but obnoxiously long souls-like that just seemingly decided boss difficulty randomly.

Good Stuff
=========================
- Can't deny that the game looks great and each of the areas in the game are beautiful, perfectly complementing the lore and settings with lots of ways to explore

- There is an incredible amount of content and the maps get larger every level culminating in a fantastically huge final level. Personally, this annoyed me by the end but for people that want to hunt for secrets and collect everything there is an amazing value for your money here.

- The combat, once you figure out the ebb and flow and usage of focus points/varied combos, becomes very fun with you getting to take full advantage of Wukongs repetoire. This gets enhanced further as you continue to get more and more spells and transformations through out the game.

- The music is usually very subdued but I really enjoyed the soundtrack. It seems to really pick up during tense moments in fights as opposed to other souls-likes where you get nonstop latin chanting after going through a fog gate.

Bad Stuff
=========================
- Boss difficulty is all over the place. Some bosses in the final chapters are absolute jokes compared to ones in the earlier zones. I'd be surprised when I got stuck on some optional sub-boss only for the chapter boss to get mowed over.

- The 4 banes, this games status effects, are layered on so thick in the back half of the game, it gets incredibly annoying. For instance, on one map, nearly every enemy poisons you and does so in 2-3 hits. On another zone, it's nearly every enemy having hte ability to set you on fire. Don't get me started on the many many bosses that inflict status effects, as most of them seem to inflict you instantly and constantly meaning if you miss a single dodge it completely changes the fight. It would be great if they lift up less aggressively.

- A map. ♥♥♥♥'s sake does this game need a map. The aforementioned levels are massive and it's very easy to take a wrong turn and get lost or miss one of the games many obtuse secret areas.

- Theres a big amount of invisible walls, which I understand is somewhat of a necessity, but there are a lot of them placed in spots where you'd imagine you'd be able to explore. Without the previously mentioned map, this can make aspects of exploration frustrating.

- For those unfamiliar with Journey to the West ( like me) a lot of references are just completely wasted or things make no sense. Vagueness is a staple of a souls-like game's lore so maybe some folks will really like this

To the point
===========================
You really cannot beat this amazingly priced, movement-based Metroidvania. Absolutely worth you time and money.

Good Stuff
===========================
- Sybil's movement tech in this game is just an incredible amount of fun. The game really goes out of its way with its variety of excellent movement puzzles to teach you the in's and outs of its system. The best part of this is that once you understand the basics you'll be running around and mixing things up, jumping, kicking and scrambling up things you would have thought impossible a few attempts ago.

Once you've mastered these techniques you'll be charging through rooms at full speed which will only deepen your appreciation to how well these actions all work cohesively.

- The environs are fun to explore even if they are a little bare bones. Each level has a wonderful sense of verticality and, if you enjoyed the movement tech as I have you'll really love searching these sprawling maps for hidden upgrades and loop backs to other zones in the castle.

- For the true enthusiast, they've also added time trials for costumes. Sure it's just trying to make par time on some races but they included it for free and, again, it puts the wonderful movement tech in the center stage.

- This game really is a fantastic value. I happened to get it on sale but would have gladly paid full price. I put a little over 5 hours in this and a completionist would probably put another 3 or so. You really get a solid amount of content for your dollar.

- This may be a negative to some but I love the N64 graphics they faithfully emulated here. It sort of occupies this weird limbo like all early low poly games but I think the creator did a nice job of making things distinct looking with the aesthetic.

Bad Stuff
================
- No way around it, combat is very shallow. This isn't a terrible thing as it's not the core focus of the game but it does make the few forced combat sections/ bosses feel more like a chore then you overcoming a powerful enemy.

- So I started playing this game right as they put out a map update and thank god because I couldn't imaging navigating without one. In fact I would say the included map is kind of ♥♥♥♥♥♥, not keeping track of the rooms you came in from etc. I'm guessing they added it due to player backlash and rightly so cause it's dumb to not have it. If anything I'm glad to see the creator is willing to take feedback.